Every MBA Needs Tech Skills—Not Just Those Headed for Silicon Valley

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- It’s notable that Chenjie Ding works in technology. Two and a half years ago, Ding was a journalist and would have been the first to tell you that she wildly lacked the skill set to work at a tech company. “When I started at Anderson, I was not good at data, and I was very conscious of that,” she says. (Anderson School of Management at UCLA is No. 12 on Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2019 ranking.) “I launched a plan to develop my data skills.” She sought out data projects in her externships and logged extensive coursework in data, analytics, and technology management.

On Monday, Nov. 4, Ding hosted 117 technology-focused MBA students from her alma mater at Amazon.com Inc., where she works as a senior program manager. Amazon is one stop on a weeklong, two-dozen-company itinerary for the students, exposing them to potential employers in Seattle and San Francisco. Well over one-third of Anderson students now go on to work at technology companies, up from 14% a few years ago. Ding arranged a keynote talk, a panel discussion, and one-on-one meetings for the students.

Graduates such as Ding are the new normal for business schools, which find themselves producing large numbers of future technology workers, as well as executives who can bridge the gap between business and technology people at non-tech companies: No matter where they work, executives can expect to oversee engineering or data or IT departments.

“There’s a real communication gap between data scientists and managers,” says Paul Oyer, a professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, No. 1 on this year’s B-schools ranking. “Managers have a ton of institutional knowledge and know how a business works, but they’re sitting on troves of data that they don’t know what to do with. And data people don’t know what questions need to be answered through the data. The person who can go in the middle is becoming more and more valuable.”

Six years ago, most students enrolled in business school to develop leadership and management skills. Raghu Sundaram, dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business, No. 13 in the ranking, says he heard from the director of operations and technology at Citigroup Inc. and the chief information officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “They had people with an excellent grasp of business or an excellent grasp of technology, but not both,” he says. “One of the first things we did was set up an advisory board and ask them what we should be doing.” The result is the 12-month Andre Koo Technology and Entrepreneurship MBA, which started in May 2018 and prepares 40 students for technology roles.

In Madrid, Martin Boehm, dean of the IE Business School (Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2019 global ranking will be released on Dec. 4), heard the same message from executives at Google LLC, Amazon, and Facebook Inc., as well as from consulting firms. “We identified two roles for which we saw companies struggling to find talent,” he says: product managers who oversee digital products and consultants who work with clients on technology. Next year, IE will launch a 10-month Tech MBA to produce 50 students who, Boehm says, will be ideal candidates for such roles.

Basic technology education has pervaded U.S. and global MBA programs over the past decade. At Columbia Business School, No. 9 on the U.S. ranking, almost half of the 750 second-year MBA students are enrolled in Introduction to Programming Using Python. “Another 100 to 150 students have engineering backgrounds and don’t need it,” says Costis Maglaras, dean of the B-school. Three hundred students are enrolled in Business Analytics, and an additional 300 are taking the sequel class, playfully referred to as Business Analytics Squared. Class enrollment is capped because, Maglaras says, “We don’t have enough professors to teach them. The demand is bigger than the supply at this time.” He’s focused on quickly growing an Analytics in Action class, in which students team up with engineering students and solve real-world corporate projects. “We started with 24 MBA students and 12 engineering students,” Maglaras says. “Now we need to do it for 240 students, and then all 750.”

The push for technology coursework in business programs is driven especially by foreign students. Graduate programs that are designated as STEM programs enable international students on F-1 visas to apply for STEM OPT extensions, which provide two additional years in the country. This is important to foreign students, who are often seeking permanent entry into the U.S. job market and want three years on a runway after graduation, rather than just one.

Many top MBA programs have resisted jumping on the STEM bandwagon. Technology coursework inevitably displaces traditional management and leadership curricula, and some deans and professors are unwilling to do that. Several also have held off on creating tech tracks within MBA programs. It's a hot topic among professors and administrators, the Top 10 program dean says. Management purists say the best way to address tech needs is to add an extra graduate degree to fill in specific skill holes, such as the University of Virginia’s master of science degree in management of IT.

“There’s a pattern where students are getting MBAs, and then getting specialized degrees, such as master’s in business analytics or technology management,” says Barbara Coward, an MBA admissions consultant in Washington. “I’ve seen that over and over again. For now, the tech sector is where all the cool jobs are. I have not yet met anyone who said they want to go to Wall Street and make a ton of money.”
 
Read more: What Good Is an MBA Anymore, Anyway? and Business School Students Are Putting the Planet Before Profits

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dimitra Kessenides at dkessenides1@bloomberg.net

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